Small Memories
Jose Saramago
Born in Portugal in 1922 in the tiny village of Azinhaga, José Saramago was only eighteen months old when he moved with his father and mother to live in a series of cramped lodgings in a working-class neighbourhood of Lisbon. Nevertheless, he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence, its river landscape and olive groves seeping deep into his memory.
Shifting back and forth between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this touching book is a mosaic of memories, a gathering together of the fragmented recollections that make up the idea of one's youth. Written with Saramago's characteristic wit and honesty, Small Memories traces the formation of an artist fascinated by words and stories from an early age and who emerged, against all the odds, as one of the world's most respected writers.
By the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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About Jose Saramago
Reviews for Small Memories
Guardian
A moving account of his childhood and adolescence...Small Memories will delight
Raymond Carr
The Spectator
A real insight into the making of a great writer
Independent
It's impossible not to be charmed by this fluid, spontaneous-seeming memoir of boyhood from the late Portuguese Nobel Laureate, Jose Saramago [...] For all its delightful novelty, however, the childhood described here is also beguilingly universal: the superstitions and terrors, the mysteries and joys
Daily Mail
A powerful and nostalgic memoir
The Times
The great thing about this memoir of boyhood is how unportentous it is for the most part
Michael Kerrigan
Scotsman
The lasting impression left by the self-portrait is of an abiding loneliness, nostalgia, and loss, leavened by humour and an unfeigned humility
Times Literary Supplement
The humiliations and joys of childhood, magnified by time, are delicately revisited
Angel Gurria-Quintana
Financial Times
The elliptical prose style that earned Saramago the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 imbues these snapshots with a sense of time irrecoverably lost as the author, who died earlier this year, reprises the significant episodes of his youth. Any lack of drama will be of little consequence to admirers of Saramago, whose mostly rural vignettes reflect the emotional pitch of an illustrious literary career
Financial Times